Hobbit Forum Refugees

UPDATE: 13/02/2011: Most posts have been moved to PT but by popular consensus we have made a new forum for ourselves free of the “family friendly” rules on PT. We’ll see what happens…

On 11 February 2011, the blog and forum at The Hobbit Movie was acquired by the owner of Planet Tolkien, another Tolkien-related site. The forums from THM are being absorbed into the PT forums, where all accounts and posts are supposed to be intact.

In the meantime, all former members of THM are free to use the comments section here to swap information, keep in touch, and just chat. A big thank you to GB for this idea.

– Eldo

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66 Responses to Hobbit Forum Refugees

If you have a Facebook you can talk to the new webmaster at ady’s old page, which has apparently also been handed over. I’ll pass the link to this page on to a few people, hopefully we can find everyone.

Ive not had much luck getting answers from anyone at this Planet Tolkien place.
Their rules are worth a look for anyone who hasn’t checked them already- a lot of what we post would fall foul of them.
I for one am in favour of saving our forum and flitting elsewhere- we can use PT to contact any old memembers once the profiles are merged and see if they want to join us. What do you think? Should we go it alone?

Thanks for letting us use your site to keep in touch while we sort this out, Eldo. Personally I’d prefer to set up a new Hobbit Movie forum, but I’d also prefer to keep our topics and discussions, which might be difficult.

I agree with both of you guys about wanting to have our own place where we can have the same anarchic freedom as before, but it would pretty much entail starting over from scratch, unless the webmaster of Planet Tolkien gives us all the data from the old site. Even then I’m not entirely sure how we would migrate that though. Fortunately it’s easy enough to set up a free forum though, and even if we don’t have the old posts we can at least make copies of some of the best threads.

Anyway, I will probably post a bit on PT once the migration is complete and maybe ask about the rules, but I have scant hope.

I was thinking about our old threads- it would a bit tedious and take a bit of work but once stuff is ‘merged’ assuming any of it makes it through the process, we could just copy and paste then post them again on the new forum- we could only go back a couple of pages per thread or it would take forever, but it means we could at least continue from where we were and it will help make us feel more at home.

Had a look at the rules as well, and Petty is right: they don’t take kindly to our kind there, so to speak. For example:

1: “2. Political / Religious Topics, Posts, Threads or Comments inside or outside of Tolkien related topics are not permitted” their reason for this is: “As moderators we have seen that such discussions always end up with people being hurt or insulted” Only shows that many of the members over there can’t have civilized discussions

2: “No single line posts, or single smiley posts.” I mean, come on, why so serious?

3: “No posting just to boost your number of posts” Sorry, Odo 😀

And I’m quite sure the buckie talk will be frowned upon. A sad day indeed 😦

I’m with Petty – let’s set up on our own. This is like the big corporations buying up the small businesses – will they not even let us have our little forum to ourselves?

Hear! Hear! We’re being stomped on. Its time to go independent.We talk about nasty corps and the big guy crapping on the small and how wrong it is- time to put our fine words into actions and go it alone before we are enveloped in corporate blandness and all hope of creativity and fun is lost forever.

I feel that we should at least talk to the guy and express our concerns about the rules. If he gives a similar response to what he said on Facebook yesterday, fine, but we’ll know where he stands. I get the feeling that he didn’t really look at the forum before buying the site.

Also, we shouldn’t burn any bridges. If we do end up striking out on our own I’d imagine we would still want new people to come by, so let’s not do anything to make this guy stop people from discussing THM on his forums. 😉

Have spent a while looking around PT and as the guy on facebook said they seem to have a smallish core group of regular posters, with a lot of reasoned debate about things tolkien. However there is little of the extra debate and playfulness that brought me to THM. I have to agree that I don’t think he looked much at the forum before he bought the site. However I have had an email from a direct enquiry saying all threads/posts will be intact! Wait and see I guess!

I was a bit comforted by that statement, but the reason I doubt he looked over the forum is because the Big Bad Serious thread and others violate his forum’s rules. In any event, that’s the sort of thing I’d like to ask him once the transition is complete (by tomorrow, hopefully!).

A chap called Neville Chamberlain was comforted by a statement once Eldo.
Once everything is merged we shall see whats become of our forum. But its not so much the lost posts (bad as that is) but the fear we will lose something altogether better once submerged in a forum of regulations and sudden increased size.

Also, it’s great to see the gang coming back together! GB hasn’t posted here but I’ve talked to him on e-mail and saw Ally on Facebook. I’m sure Petty can get in touch with Noom and Nagual are, too. I don’t know where Tin, Beren, or the others are, but some of them might be on NarniaWeb, where a few of us have accounts. Hopefully we can find everyone. 😀

I just looked at PT and apparently the transition is underway. They say to go to http://www.planet-tolkien.com/login/ and put your e-mail into the ‘lost login’ box to get a new password. I tried this but it still won’t let me log in though, so I’m currently awaiting an e-mail response from their staff. 😐

Lots of our threads and posts have invaded Planet Tolkien now, even my my thread about Tolkienshop which contained a discussion between me and GB about certain smokeable plants and the Needlehole thread which includes posts that some might find insulting (our little feminist jokes). He has probably not read it all yet, or lots of our threads and posts would be gone according to his rules.

Another thing I noticed is it seems like that forum doesn’t use the same smiley and quote codes as our old forum, because the smiley and quote codes are in our posts instead of smileys and quote boxes, which make the posts look rather silly.

I’ve noticed that too, Ringdrotten. I wonder if his moderators will go through and purge any offending posts or if they’ll just look out for such posts in the future.

As far as I can tell most of the forums have been moved over in their entirety, and all our post counts seem the same, but I cannot find the posts from the Other Fantasy Stories, Ideas and Suggestions, or Board Announcement forums. 😡

I put my email in the log in box, got a new password in my inbox, tried to log in with the new password but it didn’t work. Got this message again: “No account could be found with that username or password.”

Been reading through some of our threads over there, and some posts are missing. The first post (Petty’s) in “PJ’s Merry and Pippin” thread is gone for some reason. Can’t remember whether there was anything there that might violate PT’s rules.

I wonder if that might simply be due to a bug in the transition software. We already have the login issue and all the BB code (which is pretty universal among forums) being FUBAR, so it wouldn’t surprise me if there was an error that just deleted random posts.

The “Boromir” thread seems untouched so far, though, and that’s packed with discussions about religion and Tolkien. I guess he’s not finished with weeding out the “bad posts” yet, or that thread would be gone already.

There are plenty of rules violations that haven’t been touched, and it would be a lot of work to go root through everything that has been brought over (which of course doesn’t include three entire forums and a few miscellaneous posts). I wonder if they’ll bother with doing that, though it might have implications for his approval by these “Family Friendly Site” auditing people.

Also, something else I noticed, GB and I both changed our avatars in the past week or so, but our profiles on PT have older avatars. And the most recent post from any old thread is February 8, but the forum didn’t go offline until February 11. Between this and what has already been said, so much for “no posts will be lost”, huh? 😡

I left a comment on the blog where someone else brought up a similar issue, so I’ll wait and see if he has a way of fixing this. But in the meantime, I found another missing OP: the “Alternative adaptations” thread in the LOTR section.

This is a difficult time for me — what with Primmy expecting and Bella too (errm — not sure how that happened). Anyhow, I don’t care how this funny Tolkiens World thingee is, but I smell the dimunition of all Fredom. As you guys know, I’m am an absolute autocrat as far as Respectability goes — proper behavior on any Forium is almost paramount with me, but not quite. Freedom comes first! I would rather put up with all your oddities and crudities and enuendos and vicious politicising (at least I can put up a stern resistance on a Free forum!) but depriving any of your rights to sprout your foul, ugly and misinformed garbage, is anathema to me. Anathema, I say!!! (Ha! Three exclamation marks — bet that would be frowned on some Forums — even when three EXCLAMATION MARKS!!!!! I even got told off for over-capitilization once — an OUTRAGE!!!!!!!!!!)Don’t ive in, Eldo. Fight the good fight. And where is GB in our time of need? I hope he’s not kowtowing. No, I know he will resist too. He just needs to visit here. Where is our (albeit liberal) Leader, in our greatest time of need? (I’ll look to the East on the third day, shall I? Or was that the West? Never mind, I’ll look both ways…

I say screw ’em and strike out on our own if we can. Believe me, it’ll take them weeks or months to weed out all the “bad” posts and threads, but they WILL do that in the end. There is no way they’ll let our kind of banter on “their” forum. 😛

Eldo is right about them screwing up our avatars too. By the way, just got an email response on our thread about hobbits, wizards, elves, or dwarves.

Idiot didn’t even bother to consider what my argument actually was. I never said there were any Hobbit Wizards in Tolkien’s works. I just said that according to Tolkien’s rules it was:
A)Possible and
B)It’s a bloody Fantasy so I can be whatever I want to be. (by the way, how do I make an angry face smiley?)

Sorry I’m a bit late to the party, but I’ve been held up with yard-work, family, and back pain.

I’m not saying I might not put in the odd post or two here and there once we figure out how to log in. But for the most part I’m pretty much going to boycott their stupid forum.

I spoke to a friend of mine who has his own website and blog, and he said that as far as he knows, there isn’t any limit to how many posts can go in a coment section. He’s probably right. I’ve put posts in the commentary section after articles on CNN’s website, and sometimes they run into the thousands if it’s a subject that interests or inflames people.

Good to see you, old Beard! 😀 And so crabbit, at that. BTW, the angry face is : x without the space. Here to help!

I’m pretty unimpressed by the PT forums from the lurking I’ve been doing (in lieu of being allowed to post). Particularly amusing is how the people there seems to think he’s taking us under his wing when his forum doesn’t have any more activity than ours did, “20,000 members and counting” or not. Is it just me or are they being highly condescending?

I’ll probably give it a try and at least use it to look for other refugees who haven’t found this page yet, but the first impression is pretty grim.

Given the general consensus that we should strike out on our own, would anyone object to me setting up something through Forumotion.com using the same phpBB3 base as the old forum? (For the non-technically inclined, that means it would look and work more or less the same as our forum.) Their Terms of Service content restrictions are pretty loose, and it is IMO a nicer environment for discussion than this comment section, which is more of a stop-gap measure.

Why not, let’s give it a go. I’m glad we have someone as tech savvy as you to pull it off. 😀

By the way, had a lurk myself. I can’t even see where the hell they put all of our threads. They’ve got a few you access on the front page. but scrolling through there forums I couldn’t find any. Got any directions to our threads so I can have a gander?

As best as I can tell, the forums that have transitioned were moved into the following PT forums (the category is in brackets; for some reason all our LOTR movie discussions are now in one of their books forums):

Hobbit Movies > The Hobbit (Movie)
Breaking News > The Hobbit (Movie)
The Lord of the Rings > The Lord of the Rings (Book)
The Silmarillion > The Silmarillion (Book)
J.R.R. Tolkien > The Author (Tolkien)
New Members > Introduce yourself!

Enough! Its time we all got crabbit! Time to back our bags and move to Crickhollow. Go for it Eldo- lets have our new forum in the land of mental freedom. Even if we can’t get all our old posts back I’d rather keep the community we had than disappear into this one.

You’ve done sterliing work Eldo- get some well deserved rest. If you set up a forumm I will happly give hours over to copying and pasting as much of our old stuff from PT to the new forum- not ideal but better than losing everything.
Onwards and upwards my Hobbit Refugee friends.

You’ve done sterliing work Eldo- get some well deserved rest. If you set up a forumm I will happly give hours over to copying and pasting as much of our old stuff from PT to the new forum- not ideal but better than losing everything.
Onwards and upwards Hobbit Refugees.

Petty: “Enough! Its time we all got crabbit! Time to back our bags and move to Crickhollow. Go for it Eldo- lets have our new forum in the land of mental freedom. Even if we can’t get all our old posts back I’d rather keep the community we had than disappear into this one.”

I couldn’t agree more. 😀 Now I really must get some sleep too. New Forum is starting to look cool already. Great Job Eldo.

Three cheers for Eldo! Hobbit Forum Refugees? Please let it be Hobbit Forum Refugees.Please please please! And I vote for GB to be returned as a Moderator. It would be like the Return of the King. (Also he is nicely lenient hee hee hee).

Apologies Eldo – Squach is my daughter, who has been putting up with me pinching the laptop off her every so often to check whats going on!
Just popped into say I got my login for PT and have managed to get signed in to it appears to be working now – think I’ll go and say Hi in the introduce yourself thread – Under THMforum title so we can all say hi in the same place if we feel like it!

Well got logged in and had a chat with Taz (the webmaster guy?!) says all the stuff should be imported, it’ll take time. Old posts should stay, although swearing may be blanked. Says that the only thing mods really come down on is swearing and causing deliberate offence! And posts going foward will need to be aware of the family friendly policy!

I had a chat with that Taz person too kafria. Was very reasonable but wouldn’t give a straight answer to whether threads like the BBST would be allowed to continue. But said they would stick by their family policy.
Had a go at a forum myself Eldo- but Im hopeless at it, but if you need a hand with anything let me know- that Taz person said I should let him/her know if I was leaving and he/she would give me my contributions- not sure what that means exactly but we might be able to get our posts back if we ask very nicely!

It isn’t perfect but I think it will work. I hope to improve it more in the future. Thank you to GB for helping me test it, and yes Odo, he will still be a moderator. It’s just the natural order of things. 😀